1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to pattern anomaly detection and more specifically to a method and apparatus for performing a multi-domain anomaly pattern definition and detection.
2. Introduction
Within the field of biosurveillance, there is a need to detect emerging diseases or other biological threats as early in the lifecycle as possible. This process is known as syndromic surveillance where experts study intermediate indicators related to diseases. It is estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars could be saved along with thousands of deaths avoided if early detection could be pushed back into the incubation period (i.e. pre or early symptomatic behavior) of a disease. There is a known positive effect of early detection with the effect of traditional disease detection. Statistics show that the number of victims that may die is greatly reduced when early surveillance and detection is available when compared with late detection. There is a need to provide a data fusion and accompanying analysis across varying data sources and varying data types or domains that could describe an anomalous event from potentially different geospatial and temporal perspectives.